Digital twins for performance management in the built environment

Abstract

Recent events worldwide of climate and geological origins highlight the vulnerability of our infrastructures and stress the often dramatic consequences on our environment. Accurate digital models are needed to understand how climate change and associated risks affect buildings, while informing on ways of enhancing their adaptability and resilience. This requires a paradigm shift in design and engineering interventions as the potential for adaptation and resilience should be embedded into initial brief formulation, design, engineering, construction and facility maintenance methods. This paper argues the need for smarter and digital interventions for buildings and infrastructures and their underpinning data systems that factor in topology (including geometry), mereology, and behavioural (dynamic) considerations. Digital models can be used as a basis to understand the complex interplay between environmental variables and performance, and explore real-time response strategies (including control and actuation) to known and uncertain solicitations enabled by a new generation of technologies. The paper proposes a digital twin model for the construction and industrial assets that paves the way to a new generation of buildings and infrastructures that (a) address lifetime requirements, (b) are capable of performing optimally within the constraints of unknown future scenarios, and (c) achieve acceptable levels of adaptability, efficiency and resilience.